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Speak Out
How should the constitutional rights of prisoners be protected?
If someone commits a crime and is sent to prison, that doesn’t mean he or she forfeits all constitutional rights.
Laws vary from state to state. Some states don’t allow convicted criminals to vote. Some states restrict them from owning handguns. But the fundamental rights of inmates remain intact – they should not be subject to cruel and unusual punishment for their crimes; they should be given access to medical care and sanitary housing.
This is not always how the prison system works in reality. Especially in difficult economic times, states don’t find it easy to balance being tough on crime with providing for prisoners’ basic needs; the problem is compounded when more people enter the prison system daily while fewer are released.
This week, the Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 ruling that the State of California has “fallen short of minimum constitutional requirements” in providing for its inmates. The state prisons hold 143,345 inmates – that’s 180 percent of their capacity, according to a Los Angeles Times report. The overcrowding has caused “needless suffering and death,” according to the court.
Some examples cited in Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s ruling included 200 prisoners living in a gymnasium, or 54 prisoners sharing a toilet.
The court gave the state two years to cut the prison population by 33,630 – either by releasing inmates or transferring them to county-run jails. Even with this, California’s prisons would be overcrowded, but less so; they would go from operating at 180 percent capacity to 137.5 percent capacity.
This ruling will affect prison systems across the country. An editorial published in the Des Moines Register said, “Every state should study this ruling, especially those where legislators are quick to crack down on crime but slow to pay for prisons. California is not alone in cramming many more inmates into prisons than they were designed to hold and without enough guards or other resources.”
Iowa struggles with overcrowding as well; its prisons operate at 125 percent capacity. And Alabama operates at 190 percent capacity, higher than California. But state finance director David Perry told the Wall Street Journal that Alabama’s prisons provide “significantly better [prison] medical care than what was documented in California.”
California Gov. Jerry Brown doesn’t oppose the court’s ruling; it plays along with his plan to relieve the state’s budget by having county governments take on more prisoners convicted of less serious crimes.
But the counties will not be able to take in all of them, and there will likely be large numbers of inmates released. This did not sit well with those justices who voted against ordering the decrease in prison population.
Justice Antonin Scalia called the ruling “a judicial travesty” and warned “terrible things [are] sure to happen as a consequence of this outrageous order.”
In his dissenting opinion, he wrote that “the vast majority of inmates most generously rewarded by the re-lease order—the 46,000 whose incarceration will be ended—… will not be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness; and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym.”
What do you think?
How should the constitutional rights of prisoners be protected? Should prisoners convicted of minor crimes be released? Should they be handled by lower facilities and county jails? How far over capacity should prisons be allowed to operate? What should prison systems do to meet the basic needs of inmates? Join the discussion!
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